forbes.com Archives - 04 May 2013, Saturday

On Friday, I skip breakfast again; it’s an unavoidable part of the Bitcoin diet as there are no places that serve food before 10 a.m. accepting my currency. I lose my appetite anyway when I check the value of Bitcoin; it has plummeted to $90 over night. It has been on a steady decline...

Let’s examine what it could mean when something like Bitcoin, that is both platform and unit , is absorbed into something like PayPal that is just platform. Phil Archer writing at The Genesis Block categorized the four areas of likely impact — online wallets, escrow services, merchant...

After work, I bike to a far less high-tech Bitcoin machine at the Internet Archive, which is about 20 hills away from my work. Months ago, I bought two tickets to “Escape from a Mysterious Room,” a Japanese production that involves locking a group of 11 people in a room with hidden cl...

I asked Reddit’s Bitcoin subreddit for help finding transportation. One person offered to rent me his bike for .05 BTC for the week. As that was only $6 at the time, I wasn’t surprised when he said he was kidding and revealed that he lived in Georgia. Another Redditor named “Willworkf...

I’m a tax lawyer based in San Francisco (www.WoodLLP.com), but I handle tax matters everywhere. I enjoy untangling a tax mess from the past, disputing taxes with the government or planning taxes for the future. One of my specialties is advising about lawsuit payments. Whether you’re r...

On Tuesday morning, I emptied my wallet of all of the cash and credit cards before I left my house. Many journalists have been writing about the mechanics of buying Bitcoin and the resulting heart palpitations as they watched the dramatic rises and falls in the digital currency’s wort...

I personally own Bitcoin in my hedge fun, I own Bitcoin in my fund, I own Bitcoin in my private account. It is a huge deal. It’s a huge, huge, huge deal. Because what you’re talking about right now is, for the next three to five years, an unbelievably better stored value. It is gold 2...

It is nearly impossible to detach politics from bitcoin although many try. The reason being that everything bitcoin touches has social and political ramifications that are too startling to ignore. Argentina is no exception. The mere existence of the Bitcoin network is subversive. The ...

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Additionally, the foundation maintains an active relationship with various press entities seeking information about Bitcoin and the role of the nonprofit foundation. Since these inquiries come from around the world, we strive to be inclusive and we enlist the voluntary support of foun...

I’ve noticed a contrast in the way programmers and non-programmers react when they first hear about Bitcoin. And I think an analogy to cryptography helps explain it. Cryptography has been around for centuries, but until recently all the practical encryption systems people knew about w...

So your brand is only as good as your last transaction . We marketers talk a lot about brand equity, but the social basis for value suggests that brands are constantly moving targets. People assign a new price every time they transact, either sharing information with one another, or g...

Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Move down Crazy Blind Date Not So Blind Anymore, Thanks To Hack Jeff Bercovici Forbes Staff Bitcoin And The Future Of Money My Say Contributor Also accepted if civilization is still standing. As a company whose business proposition has gone from kind o...

A screenshot of some of Silk Road's offerings, with its price marked in Bitcoins. As the crypto-currency Bitcoin has skyrocketed in value over the last weeks and then fallen even faster, it’s produced plenty of excitement and heartache for investors. But at least one Bitcoin enthusias...

When governments undermine faith in their currencies people turn to alternatives. Weak as the dollar has been in recent years, for example, it is still seen in many parts of the world as infinitely preferable to the local money, which is why most of our physical currency- especially o...

Opponents of Bitcoin claim that this virtual currency allows for exchanges made in the dark corners of the Internet where anonymous buyers can purchase any number of illicit items from anonymous sellers. While there might have been issues with illegal activities in the early days of B...

I keep seeing people making the argument that Bitcoin’s limited supply leads to deflation, which leads to “hoarding,” which kills Bitcoin’s value as a currency. This argument gets things exactly backwards. To see why, we have to start with a thought experiment. Suppose there’s an econ...

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I’m Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at LIU Post in New York. I’ve published several articles in professional journals and magazines, including Barron’s, The New York Times, Japan Times, Newsday, Plain Dealer, Edge Singapore, European Management Review, Management In...

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Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware, assuming an average price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour (a little higher than the U.S. average, lower than some h...

Yesterday I promised to address the issues raised by Bitcoin’s volatility. Bitcoin’s critics are absolutely right that stability is a desirable property for a currency, and that Bitcoin’s large swings make the currency less attractive. However, I don’t think this is a fatal flaw. Firs...

Some say that the recent rise of more advanced bitcoin-related financial services, including hedge funds, futures, and derivatives markets, could help stabilize the future of Bitcoin. This week, a soon-to-launch New York -based “leveraged forex trading platform” for Bitcoin, called Co...

Move up http://i.forbesimg.com t Move down Why The Financial Technology Revolution Is Only Just Getting Started CIO Central Guest Contributor The Singapore Exchange (SGX) has moved its clearing and settlement operations from an IBM mainframe running zOS to commodity Linux servers to i...

A diagram from the Johns Hopkins paper on Zerocoin shows how it theoretically adds untraceability to Bitcoin's network. In (a), a Bitcoin is traced through several transactions. In (b), it's traded for an untraceable Zerocoin and later redeemed for another Bitcoin. The dotted line rep...

A number of smart people have made arguments like this one from Matt Yglesias: If over time more and more people want to use Bitcoins to conduct transactions of various kinds, then the price of bitcoins is going to have to rise and rise. The problem is that if the price of a bitcoin i...

Wednesday saw one of the largest declines in Bitcoin prices in the cryptocurrency’s lifetime. Many commentators declared the fall the beginning of the end for Bitcoin. I’m not sure if that’s correct or not, but in any event a sense of perspective is always helpful. So here are the big...

It has become almost obligatory for mainstream journalists writing about Bitcoin to describe the currency’s current value as a bubble. It’s widely assumed that the recent increase in the value of a bitcoin, from $13.50 at the start of the year to more than $250 today, must be the resu...

A financial network is a technological platform that people build businesses on top of. And the traditional banking and credit card networks are closed platforms. If you want to build an e-commerce site, a payment network like Paypal, or any other service that deals in dollars, you ne...

Like gold and canned mackerel, bullets are used for purposes other than storing value, but they also could be vulnerable to hoarding-induced speculation. All those silly Internet posts about the government buying trillions of bullets, which some see as a backdoor form of gun control, ...

The two charts below are Google Trends plots, comparing search volumes of the words “Cyprus” and “Bitcoin” in an attempt to correlate real-world events with BTC prices. A note about the Google Trends charts below: the Y Axis is “Percentage of Peak Search Volume”. That means that the d...